Re: Cyrillic guillemotleft and guillemotright

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri May 13 2005 - 18:00:28 CDT

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Re: Cyrillic guillemotleft and guillemotright"

    From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
    > On 13/05/2005 22:45, Philippe Verdy wrote:
    >
    >> I can't read your EPS file attachments, but you seem to assume that the
    >> "French" guillemots only have the glyphs shown in the Unicode charts.
    >>
    > A guillemot is a bird. The marks which you are talking about are called
    > guillemets.

    I know, but I used the English term used in Unicode names, because the
    message was in English. I don't know if the French term "guillemet" is
    actually an acceptable or prefered term for English too.

    I note this article in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online about "guillemet":
    http://www.britannica.com/search?query=guillemet&submit=Find&source=MWTEXT 

    Some free extract is titled this way:
    [quote]
    *Punctuation in French, Spanish, German, and Russian*
    Since the modern punctuation of all the western European languages stems
    from the practice of the great Italian and French printers of the 15th and
    16th centuries, national differences are not considerable. In French,
    guillemets (<< >>) or dashes are used to mark quotations. In Spanish, since
    the middle of the 18th century, an inverted mark of interrogation or
    exclamation has.
    [/quote]

    - You'll note on this page that it shows guillemets with an "exponent"
    style. This is not the most used form in French.
    - You'll note also that the article says that it is used for Russian too...
    so for Cyrillic texts.
    - It does not speak about the normally required unbreakable narrow space
    (named "une fine" or "une espace fine" in French, and that should be at most
    half the width of a figure space, because this narrow space is also normally
    used in French as the thousands separator in numbers) that should be used in
    French between the guillemets and the quoted text: this stylistic
    requirement comes from the fact that those guillemets are most often
    rendered with x-height, and using some additional space allows easier
    reading of the quoted text; I'm not sure that this is still required and
    used when using guillemets with the "exponent" size and position (like the
    "English" quotation marks and apostrophes).



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